Who Is Jonathan Kozol?

Jonathan Kozol is an educator, activist, and New York Times bestselling author who has been addressing the inequality in American education - particularly for Black and Hispanic students - since the ‘60s when he wrote Death at an Early Age. Nearly sixty years later, he released An End to Inequality, calling for reparations to the divided education system. Impressive as his lifelong advocacy is, the sheer time spanning his commitment to underserved American youths is also a reminder of how slow the country is to change for the better. Between the two books, several generations have grown up within a shattered system - one that continuously fails to provide a fair playing field indiscriminate of race and socioeconomic status. 

Kozol is well aware of the disparity, as he spent years providing education to the very students he writes about. “First we isolate these children in separate and underfunded and often dreary-looking schools in shameful disrepair,” he said, in an interview for Education Week. “Then we treat them as defective little people who cannot learn in normal ways like children in the mainstream of America.”

Some have been critical of Kozol for overlooking instances of what are seen as positive progression, like establishing charter schools or developing new reading programs. Unfortunately, while those things are good, they are ultimately pebbles, hardly raising the water level enough to reach those in need. His firsthand awareness of this inequality and an admirable degree of personal integrity have positioned him against false optimism. “If we’re talking about Black and Latino children in our public schools, I think it’s unrealistic to be optimistic,” he told the NYT. The little changes are insufficient, and overpraising them is a route to complacency. 

Kozol fights for an overhaul, for a truly democratic system, over alternatives like the aforementioned charters. His conviction stems far beyond his knowledgeable writing. In 1965, he was fired for reading poems by Langston Hughes to students in Boston - decades before the alt-right politicians of today moved to suppress history and dictate truth by having Black literature removed from libraries. 

Between his first and most recent books, Kozol wrote several complementary award-winners involving the education system. He also addressed the ongoing travesty of homelessness in 1988 with Rachel and Her Children. On a different note, in 2015 he published The Theft of Memory, a more personal story that involves a deep look into his father, a renowned doctor, and their relationship while he battled Alzheimer’s - one of the very neurodegenerative diseases he studied.

For more information on Mr. Kozol, visit his website.